A socially engaged film and performance project exploring collective dreaming, transformation, and ecological imagination
Overview
Quasi-Real is a socially engaged, practice-based film project developed as a hybrid form of documentary. Th eproject combines collective participation, movement practice, sculptural installation, and experimental visual and sonic language. Conceived as a series of filmic études or dreamscapes, the project unfolds through encounters with local participants who explore the threshold between imagination and lived reality.
Rooted in eco-somatics, Butoh, and agential realism, the work invites participants into shared processes of dreaming, embodiment, and ecological listening. Through guided conversations, sensory exploration, and movement, participants bring forth images, sensations, and stories from their inner worlds.
As initiating artist, choreographer, and director, I will work alongside a group of contributing artists and makers to translate the shared dream materials into physical form, giving body to the intangible through sculptural and scenographic compositions that emerge from participants’ visions. Together we will create tactile dreamscapes that combine movement, material, image, and sound, filmed as extensions of an embodied world, immersed in the interbeing of landscape, matter, and dream. These collaborative environments act as thresholds where body and imagination converge, forming the visual and sensorial foundation of the filmic études.
The project results in an evolving constellation of short hybrid films and sculptural environments, accessible through screenings, installations, and a digital living archive.
Anna Kushnerova
Vision and Context
In an age of ecological uncertainty and perceptual fatigue, Quasi-Real proposes imagination as a form of repair and a way to reawaken our capacity to feel and dream with the more-than-human world. The project situates dreaming as an act of ecological participation, attuning to the subtle agencies of other beings, elementals, and the living yet seldom-sensed presences that compose the world.
At its core, Quasi-Real is an invocation of the living cosmos where myth, ancestral memory, and unseen presences may speak through gesture, image, sound, and material. The project opens the imaginative field to animal spirits, ancestral realms, and folkloric intentions, weaving contemporary experience with ancient symbolic strata that continue to pulse through landscape and body.
Working within Devon’s communities, Quasi-Real draws upon Butoh’s poetics of metamorphosis, where the body becomes landscape, animal, or shadow—a vessel through which non-human temporalities can move. Through shared dreaming and embodied play, participants sense these crossings; and through collaborative sculptural and visual processes, these ephemeral states take tangible form.
Participants engage through attunement and embodied imagination, exploring the subtle movements that occur when perception opens to the wider field of life. The body becomes an instrument of sensing: porous, responsive, and alive to the textures of landscape, memory, and material.
Methodology: Eco-Somatic Practice, Butoh Transformation, and Sculptural Translation
The methodology of Quasi-Real interlaces eco-somatic awareness with the transformational ethos of Butoh, extending these sensibilities into sculptural and cinematic creation. Drawing on Butoh practice, the project arises from a lineage in which the body is a vessel of listening, permeability, and transformation—a medium through which the invisible, the ancestral, and the more-than-human find expression.
The body becomes a site of relational listening, an instrument through which the world speaks back. It is an ecosystem responding.
Each participant’s journey unfolds through a cyclical process of encounter, reflection, and return. The work begins with everyday observation—an invitation to share the casual and conscious landscapes of daily life. Through open dialogue, participants describe their habitual environments, gestures, and rhythms: How do you move through your day? What rituals, actions, or repetitions shape your hours? This mapping of the ordinary allows the subtle language of habit and attention to surface, creating a foundation for deeper exploration.
From this initial field, a second phase invites participants into imaginal and sensory territories, guided through their most responsive sense channels—visual, auditory, tactile, or kinesthetic. These journeys become portals for dream imagery, symbolic associations, and embodied memory to arise. Through return encounters, the process deepens: gestures from everyday life transform into poetic or mythic forms; dreams and synchronicities are noticed and integrated; symbolic material gathers density.
The methodology unfolds as a spiral of return—each meeting a deepening passage into the same field of relation. Over time, participants enter a playful, dreamlike matrix where perspectives shift and meanings form through association and synesthetic perception. The process becomes a rehearsal of transformation, where body, imagination, and matter co-compose a shared ecology of attention.
Each phase of the wider process unfolds as an invocation—an offering to the unseen—where artistic practice becomes dialogue with the animate and the ancestral:
Dreamwork and Somatic Listening – guided journeys and reflective dialogue that bring forth imaginal material anchored in bodily memory and ecological sensitivity.
Embodied Transformation – sensory explorations and improvisations that invite participants to inhabit other species, materials, or elements: becoming wind, stone, mycelium, or mist, tracing the presence of animal, elemental, and mythic forces through sensation and imagination.
Site-Responsive Scores – practices of listening and movement in outdoor environments, tuning to the micro-temporalities of place and to the ancestral resonance of landscape.
Artistic Translation – collective interpretation of dream imagery through sculpture, costume, and scenography, created in collaboration with visual practitioners. These material forms act as thresholds between the physical and the imaginal, bridging folkloric, mythic, and ecological layers of experience.
Filmic Co-Creation: The Camera as Somatic and Mythic Participant – filming becomes a process of embodied correspondence, where the camera operator enters the same imaginal and ecological field as the participants. Through guided attunement, the camera person undergoes transformation within the scene, responding to its atmospheres and mythic textures. The camera becomes a sensory organ of relation rather than a recording tool—an instrument through which the world perceives itself and image arises as living exchange.
The Hybrid Form: Reality and Dream as Co-Emergent Fields
At the heart of Quasi-Real lies an exploration of hybridity—where documentary becomes an act of co-emergence between actuality and imagination. The project interlaces observational fragments of daily life with imaginal landscapes, weaving gestures, environments, and dream-states into a single living continuum in which reality and vision breathe together.
Here, reality unfolds as a living membrane, porous to dream, myth, and subconscious resonance. The camera moves through layers of perception, tracing the moment where the ordinary ripens into the visionary: a hand washing fruit, a field in mist, a voice in reflection opening into archetypal space. Each filmic étude embodies truth in becoming, the unfolding of life in real time intertwined with the dreamscape of subconscious matter.
This hybrid form grows from within the field of relation. It recognises conscious and unconscious, human and non-human, as mutually shaping presences through which images are born. In this sense, Quasi-Real approaches cinema as an ecology of perception, a space where the visible and invisible coalesce, and the world dreams itself through the language of film.
Acoustic and Sonic Development
Sound functions as both container and activator within Quasi-Real’s methodology. Acoustic textures are developed alongside movement, material, and image—drawn from field recordings, bodily resonance, and participants’ vocal and environmental soundscapes.
These sonic elements serve as bridges between perception and imagination:
Attunement: Ambient or improvised sounds modulate awareness, guiding participants into deeper sensory states/ perhaps in a form of sound bath/ sculptural instruments.
Translation: The tonalities of speech, breath, and environment are transposed into layered acoustic compositions that mirror the emotional and imaginal atmosphere of each session.
Correspondence: Sound operates as a parallel language, interpreting and amplifying the textures, densities, and emotional frequencies of gestures and materials.
Integration: The resulting soundscapes accompany the filmic études and installations as fluid, living ecologies of resonance—inviting synesthetic perception and sensory participation/ perhaps sound - sculpture installations become part of the dreamscape set.
The sonic practice becomes a form of acoustic divination: a way of listening into the intervals between body, material, and dream, allowing resonance to reveal the hidden life of each encounter.
Through these interwoven methods, Quasi-Real becomes a study in how imagination materialises through body and matter, summoning a mythic ecology where living beings, ancestral echoes, and cosmic rhythms interweave.
Creative Process and Structure
Recruitment and Invitation – an open call prioritising inclusion, accessibility, and local connection. Particular encouragement will be given to members of village and rural communities—elders, farmers, craftspeople, and those whose lives are interwoven with land-based or traditional practices. Invitations will be shared through community boards, town halls, local gatherings, and informal word-of-mouth networks, building trust through direct conversation and presence.
The invitation process itself becomes part of the work’s ethos: one of listening, curiosity, and reciprocity. Rather than seeking “participants,” the project reaches out to potential collaborators and custodians of local knowledge, honouring their lived experience as a vital thread in the collective fabric. Each invitation carries an openness to encounter—to stories, gestures, and histories embedded in place—ensuring that participation arises from genuine relationship rather than extraction.
Dream Encounters – facilitated workshops combining conversation, movement, and sensory listening.
Material Development – collaborative creation of sculptural and scenographic works led by the artistic team, emerging from participants’ dream imagery and ecological references.
Filming and Site-Responsive Encounters/ Cast – collaborative filming sessions in natural and domestic landscapes, integrating the sculptural forms as active participants in each scene.
Depending on the availability of resources and collaborative partnerships, certain filmic études may be expanded through the participation of additional performers—actors, dancers, and choral or sound ensembles—who embody the multiplicity of the dream ecology. These presences function not as separate characters but as extensions of the environment itself: gestures, voices, and forms arising from the same living field as the participants.
A chorus of human and more-than-human beings—a gathering that might include a murmuring choir of insects, a trio of wind-bodies, or a slow procession of shadowed figures—will allow the transformational spectrum of each scene to unfold more fully. Through these collective embodiments, the filmic world becomes a porous ecosystem of correspondences, where body, voice, and landscape co-compose new mythic realities.
Editing and Composition – each encounter shaped into a self-contained filmic étude; together forming a constellation of dreamscapes.
Public Sharing and Archive – community screenings, installations combining film and sculpture, and an evolving online archive.
Aims
To co-create a hybrid body of work blending participatory processes with sculptural and cinematic expression.
To explore eco-somatic, mythopoetic, and Butoh-informed methodologies as grounds for ecological art-making.
To nurture ecological awareness through embodied and material dialogue with non-human and ancestral worlds.
To expand access to experimental art, creating inclusive spaces for imagination and co-reflection.
Artistic and Social Innovation
Quasi-Real reimagines documentary as a living ecology of relations, a space where the boundaries between artist, participant, landscape, and material become permeable. Each étude arises from a moment of correspondence, a meeting through which gesture, matter, and imagination co-create. The sculptural process functions as material dreaming, allowing forms to emerge from the deep field of collective and ancestral imagination.
The resulting works—hybrid films, objects, and environments—form a documentary of transformation, recording states of becoming. The filmic process mirrors the rhythms of life itself: simultaneous emergence, decay, and renewal. In this sense, Quasi-Real embodies Human Clay’s ethos of art as correspondence—where creation unfolds as an offering to the living world and as an act of listening within it.
Through its hybrid form, the project extends Human Clay’s commitment to art as an ecological practice: one that acknowledges the permeability between human and non-human, conscious and subconscious, presence and trace. It treats filmmaking as an organism that breathes with its subjects—a relational act through which both artist and environment are changed.
Beyond its aesthetic contribution, Quasi-Real serves as a laboratory of attention and mythic re-enchantment, cultivating sensitivity, empathy, and ecological imagination within both participants and audiences. By bringing community, artistry, and the dreaming of matter into dialogue, the project demonstrates how documentary can evolve into a living ceremony of perception—an invitation to see, feel, and dream the world anew.
Community and Environmental Engagement
Free participation for community members from diverse backgrounds.
Collaboration with local cultural and environmental organisations to ensure inclusive access.
Use of local sites and sustainable materials, reducing travel and environmental impact.
Accessible screenings and installations, supported by an open-access digital archive.
All sculptural materials drawn from recycled, natural, or biodegradable sources.
Evaluation and Legacy
Evaluation combines artistic reflection and participatory feedback:
Participant journals and recorded conversations.
Audience discussions and written reflections after screenings.
Artistic review and internal evaluation of process, ethics, and ecological impact.
Legacy outcomes include:
A growing digital archive of filmic études and sculptural works.
Strengthened community and institutional partnerships across Devon.
Development of a model for hybrid documentary practice integrating eco-somatics, mythology, performance, and sculpture.
Notes for funding and partnership pathways:
• Arts Council England – Project Grants (core).
• Esmée Fairbairn Foundation, Jerwood Arts, Paul Hamlyn Foundation – participatory and inclusive arts.
• Garfield Weston Foundation – community arts and organisational development.
• Community Foundations (Devon) – place-based cultural projects.
• Film Hub South West / BFI Network – experimental moving-image dissemination.
• Universities (Exeter, Falmouth) – partners in artistic research, environmental humanities, and mythology.